“It won’t be better, but I’ll settle for different,” sang the Waitresses in their non-hit “Redland.” So might be the justification for Wener Herzog’s odd reimagining of Abel Ferrara’s brutal 1992 cult drama. It’s odd enough that such a movie would be remade at all, let alone by the director of Grizzly Man, Rescue Dawn, and Encounters at the End of the World, true-life sagas of men in extreme settings. At first, this version seems like a somewhat ordinary detective drama, though the opening scene, in which cops played by Nicolas Cage and Val Kilmer debate about whether to rescue a trapped victim of Hurricane Katrina or bet on when rising water will drown him, gives an indication of things to come. (The setting is transplanted from New York.)
Cage plays the cop that gets promoted to lieutenant and heads up the search for whoever massacred a family of African immigrants. But this ordinary plot turns out to be the device by which we observe the lieutenant aiming to score drugs, illicit sex, and a means to recover from gambling debts. And that, in turn, proves a device for what might be Cage’s most over-the-top performance yet, which is saying something. Drama gives way to farce as he wiggles his way in and out of trouble with his bookie, his prostitute girlfriend (Eva Mendes), his alcoholic father, his father’s alcoholic girlfriend, drug dealers, and gangsters. In one scene, the routine search of an amorous couple turns into a wild-eyed Cage trading some blow and a blow job (by the girl, in front of the guy, in a parking lot) for not arresting the couple. And the lieutenant, though bad, is not even the most unsavory character in the movie. There’s enough happening to keep things interesting, and a wacky ending that suggests that life is God’s cosmic joke, but it’s a close call as to whether Herzog’s remake is satirical or just plain dumb.
IMDB link
viewed 11/23/09 at Prince [PFS screening] and reviewed 11/25/09 and 12/1/09
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